SparkNotes: Anthem: Important Quotations Explained, page 2

Theirs is the banner in my hand. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. We're meant to be left asking the question, 'How can you be free if you're never alone? The other, of course, involves orcs. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them. I am not a tool for their use. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

Anthem Quotes and Analysis

Now, remember this moment and cherish it. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. But tonight, for a reason we cannot fathom, we wish it were possible to us to know the likeness of our own person. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions. I shall choose my friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters.

Anthem Quotes from LitCharts

We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. When the achieving mind arises, you lose contact with the paradise you are in. For our face and our body were beautiful. And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. It is base and evil. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher.

Anthem Quotes by Ayn Rand

Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written - the worst books ever written don't even get published - they were certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously. Its dogmatism is without appeal. It is the same kind of stoicism that Equality 7-2521 himself demonstrates when he is incarcerated and beaten at the Palace of Corrective Detention for refusing to tell the council about his tunnel when he returns late to the Home of the Street Sweepers. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. For that which they died to save can never perish. Tomorrow, in the full light of day, we shall take our box, and leave our tunnel open, and walk through the streets to the Home of the Scholars. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Anthem Quotes and Analysis

Pay for your own fucking schools. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. Men never see their own faces and never ask their brothers about it, for it is evil to have concern for their own faces or bodies. But we cannot resist it. At first, man was enslaved by the gods. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context.

Anthem Quotes with Page Numbers

And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have fought against saying it, but now it is said. So long a road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone! The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil. If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? You walk, but our brothers crawl. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth.

Anthem Quotes and Analysis

It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. It is its own purpose. So International 4-8818 and we have never spoken of it.

Anthem Health Insurance, Medicare, & Group Health Plans

In a collectivist world, the most natural parts of life--having sex and bearing children--become a tedious problem, which the state must solve by establishing… Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. You can cancel anytime before your next renewal date. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands which made it, or is there a line to divide these two? Then let him join hands with others if he wishes, but only beyond his holy threshold. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. In Rand's view, the celebration of the body is akin to the celebration of the individual, and Equality 7-2521 describes the electrical wire as an extension of his self.